Emanuele Penocchio is a postdoc in the Department of Chemistry at Northwestern University. After studying chemistry, he obtained a Ph.D. in Physics in 2022, with a thesis on the nonequilibrium thermodynamics of chemical reaction networks. Emanuele’s research focuses on the physical chemistry underlying chemical systems that consume energy to perform functions. He believes in the dialogue between theoreticians and experimentalists as a way to identify worth-answering theoretical questions.